The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  After a week we had bought a splendid Oldsmobile secondhand—that is, used—for $360, of which one-third had to be paid down, the rest divided over sixteen months.

  The tax for such a car is eighteen dollars per year, five dollars has to be paid to the state where you live, there is no required insurance, private insurance costs are small, and gasoline is not expensive.

  These small costs of keeping it make the auto useful and affordable for a large part of the population.

  My new old Oldsmobile held five persons, was painted a distinguished beige outside, and upholstered inside with a gray material that could have been used just as well for a fine men’s suit. My Oldsmobile was in no way aged; it was a 1937 model and was only four years old when we bought it, in the best condition, equipped with radio, heater, defroster, cigarette lighter, and an inside light on the dashboard that showed whether we had the headlights on high or low beam.

  In this new-bought car of ours I took my driving test and drove that same day on all the highways and byways of Vermont to look for a farm. I saw countless houses and farms in the following days, but there was always something wrong.

  Many lay too far from the road, many were set too near the road. I saw little modern houses whose bedrooms and living rooms were the size of beach houses, and whose bathtub, furnace, and toilet were crowded into the same space. Other houses were again larger, but the outside walls were so thin that the wind blew through the walls and moved the curtains.

  I saw massive, beautiful, well-furnished houses and longed for the money that one needed to live in them.

  And then there were here and there wonderful old farmhouses, half fallen down and often abandoned. They were available for little money, but one would have to spend at least two thousand dollars to make them habitable.

  These “abandoned farms” are a strange feature of America.

  The farms are abandoned, perhaps, because the last owner has died and his heir has a better house. Or a family abandoned the house because they migrated to a more fertile and warmer region in the West.

  Often they don’t even lock up the house. A couple of chairs, tables, bedsteads remain. The teakettle sits on the stove, and here and there an old piece of clothing is hanging, or an old hat is lying and being slowly eaten away by the mice, and the paper is coming loose from the walls.

  If the new owner appears in time to rescue the house from decay, it will generally be his pride and joy. For these abandoned farms have in their basic architecture the material to become beautiful houses.

  That was the nature of the houses I saw, and when I came back home again after about ten days, tired and impatient from my fruitless search, I found Zuck sitting in his wingchair, smoking his pipe, and he looked at me mysteriously and with amusement.

  Zuck didn’t like driving and took long walks daily, six to eight hours through the pathless woods on old Indian trails, leaving the house-hunting to me.

  That evening, when I described my fruitless search to him again, gave vent to my discouragement, and called us fools for giving up our good apartment in New York without being able to find the right house in the country, Zuck said suddenly, “I’ve found the house.” He didn’t say “a house,” he said “the house,” and refused to explain further.

  The next morning friends came who were also Zuck’s publishers.

  They decided to go to the house with us.

  They wanted to see the house in which we would perhaps live in the future, in which perhaps Zuck would again write. They knew that it was vital for us to find the right house.

  They took us to the house in their car. That was a poor idea, since they had a fine city car that was not made for Vermont logging roads.

  When we turned from the main road into a woods road—at Zuck’s direction—we found a sign. There stood written in a child’s hand on a blue arrow: Dream Valley.

  The valley was a dream in beauty, and the quiet was broken only by the spinning of the auto wheels in the soft grass, the complaining of the motor, the grinding and rubbing of metal parts on rocks, and the cursing of the driver.

  Suddenly the woods opened out and provided an enchanted view. To the right lay meadow pastures, to the left was a little mountain lake with a rowboat. In the distance we could see blue, cone-shaped Mt. Ascutney. And then we saw the roof of a house, a piece of window, and a bit of house wall covered with brown shingles.

  The roof, as in many American farmhouses, slopes steeply to the ground floor windows on one side, and on the other it looks pushed up and ends in a gentle slope over the windows of the second story. Seen from the gable end, the roof makes a wide angle, with one side short and flat, while the other falls off long and steep.

  The house was locked.

  We went around the house and peered in the windows.

  There was a bedroom with three windows, wood-paneled walls, and an open fireplace. We were told that this was where the mother of the family had slept.

  There was a dining room on the southeast, and over the door hung the motto: “I call to Thee at every hour.” On the west side was a living room with six windows and hand-hewn beams on the ceiling. The fireplace in this room consisted in its upper part of one mighty block of stone. How they got that into place is still a mystery to us. Probably they built the house around the fireplace.

  In Vermont it was impossible to build for a long time because the great Indian trails went through the land, and on these Indian highways the houses were burned down so rapidly that it was hardly worth building.

  The house was built in 1783, after the Indian attacks had to a great extent fallen off. In those days the settlers could build everything, even fireplaces, of stone blocks.

  In the large fireplace a teakettle hung from an iron hook. When we looked through the window, it was still gilded, something done by the great-grandchild of the Irish grandmother who had brought her teakettle with her and hung it up there. Later we scraped off the gold, and now it is smoke-blackened as before.

  In the rocks of the fireplace is a brick oven. A small iron door is opened, straw and wood are placed in the oven and lit, and the stone walls are heated by the fire. Then the hot ashes are pushed to the back, where they fall into the cellar through a small hole and can be removed later. The dough is shoved into the hot oven and baked into bread there.

  The kitchen was next to the “living room,” as it is called in America, the room where one lives, where the radio and the phonograph stand, where father reads the newspaper, mother sews, and the children romp.

  The kitchen was seven yards long and very irregular in width, as I discovered when I had to order linoleum later.

  I figured out that I took as many steps in this kitchen in the course of the years as I would have taken to walk to Florida. My family said this estimate was exaggerated, that I could not have gone two thousand miles. They were right, but sometimes exaggeration keeps one from collapse.

  Attached to the kitchen was a shed that later became our garage.

  Separated from the house was a gigantic barn in which we later kept the hay, the pigs, and sometimes the goats.

  Quite near the house stood a little shed in which corn was hung up to dry. It stood on six stone legs like the huts in the Wallis [Switzerland], in which they dry the Wallisian meat. Later I looked at this shed from my bedroom window, and I sometimes wondered whether it wouldn’t someday stagger down the steep hill on its six stone legs.

  There were five more rooms on the second floor of the house, but we couldn’t see them then because we didn’t find the ladder.

  That was our house.

  The Backwoods Farm was its name.

  I have often asked painters and architects: What makes a house beautiful, what makes a house pleasant? Can you make a house pleasant purposely and intentionally? How can a planned, well-built house make you uncomfortable, how can a tumbledown farmhouse delight you? It is something indefinable because it doesn’t have to do with art directly. A painter explained to me once that it
depends on the golden mean, the meeting between geometry and beauty.

  Zuck sat on the steps in front of the house and spoke about the drawbacks of the house. He knew them because he had been in it the day before.

  When he had come near the house, he said, he had seen a man who was mowing the meadow.

  “Good weather,” the man had said.

  “Fine weather,” said Zuck.

  The man went on mowing, then he laid the scythe down and went into the kitchen.

  “Good spring water,” he said and came to the kitchen door. “Do you want to try it?”

  “Yes,” said Zuck.

  The water flowed out of a pipe into a tin sink in a thin stream.

  The man filled a stoneware jug with water.

  As Zuck set down the jug, he said, “I’d like to live here.”

  “Yeah,” said the man.

  “Have you ever thought of renting this house?” Zuck asked.

  “No,” said the man.

  “Can we talk about it?” said Zuck.

  “Yes,” said the man, “come see me anytime.”

  There was no plumbing in the house, no bathroom, no sewer, no electricity, no telephone, no stoves. The house had not been lived in for twelve years.

  How it happened I don’t know, but it happened.

  We had a discussion with him, the owner of the house, who lived in the next town and owned a store there.

  He rented us the house. We didn’t really know why he did it, for the rent was low. He was a big, lean, white-haired man, who looked like one of the Pilgrim fathers, stern and silent. He regarded us with a look that we often met later. The look meant: queer, strange, crazy people. We didn’t know for a long time that they had considered us odd characters from the beginning.

  They, those queer, strange inhabitants of Vermont, could sometimes make life quite difficult for city people from New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles by their mistrust and reserve.

  We cannot complain, for we did not have a hard time with them, and that was probably because they thought of us as odd characters.

  And sometimes I have the suspicion that we did become odd characters in the Vermont air, which hatches odd characters.

  The rental contract was contained in the form of a letter, certified by no notary, which gave witness to our mutual agreement: the house owner would make the house livable, and we would live in it.

  Then the owner went to work.

  That was the beginning of August, and on the fifteenth of September we moved in.

  Plumbing, bathroom, sewer, electricity, telephone, and three woodstoves were there.

  He, the Owner—we always spoke of him with a capital letter— he did most of the work with a single helper. He got paler and thinner with every day. Zuck worried about it.

  “I don’t know if He can take it without collapsing,” Zuck said, as he saw how He dug the drainage ditch in the stony ground. The deeper He dug, the thinner and paler He got.

  We didn’t know yet how much a Vermonter can and must take.

  Our furniture arrived from New York. There were some good antiques with it, which we had acquired cheaply because the owner could not use these enormous pieces in a small New York apartment.

  The great Renaissance cupboard and the chest were set in the living room. The matching long narrow wooden table went into Zuck’s room with a Bavarian peasant chest. The twelve-foot-long wooden table, a refectory table from a Swabian monastery, became our dining room table. He, the Owner, brought us beautifully turned church benches, discarded from his Catholic church, which went splendidly with our monastery table.

  We also had some solid, modern furniture for our bedrooms. The Owner had left some chairs, tables, and writing desks in the house, and the rest I ordered on the installment plan from Sears and Roe-buck, that fabulous mail-order house for everything that one needs in life.

  I fell completely under the spell of those Sears and Roebuck catalogs in the next years, and I became an auction follower as well. Auctions in the country are worth going to just for the show, not to mention the real bargains one can find in old handwork.

  In that first winter we had as animals only two dogs, three cats, a mentally ill duck, and a feeble chicken. We had been given the duck and the chicken by friends.

  In that first winter I had nothing to do but housework, cooking, washing, cleaning, and sewing, especially curtains and bedspreads.

  I ordered most of the material from Sears and Roebuck, and since I had no machine, I had to sew everything by hand. Zuck got green curtains in his room, which went well with his bird prints and the pale green peasant chest.

  Winnetou, our younger daughter, had white curtains with figures on them: peasants, churches, houses, chests, hearts, trees in red and blue, and from the same material I sewed her covers for the ugly frame of her iron bed that I had acquired at an auction.

  Michi, the older, had a room with yellow curtains and pillows on which southern plantation life was pictured. Fine ladies from the glamorous time before the Civil War waved from their carriages to parading soldiers. Black mammies dressed chickens southern style, and in the background were pictured the white mansions of the plantation owners.

  We called Michi’s room “Gone With the Wind.” Perhaps it was a prophecy, for a few years later she married a man from the South and now lives in the southern states.

  My room had white batiste curtains, a blue rug, and a chintz-covered down coverlet on the bed and looked like the room of a lady. This I urgently needed as a contrast to working in the kitchen and later in the barn.

  The dining room had blue-striped curtains, the kitchen red striped.

  For the living room I needed twelve curtains for six windows, and they were made only after Sears and Roebuck had a sale of dark-striped cotton material for men’s shirts.

  This first winter on the farm could have been very peaceful, if twelve weeks later the war hadn’t broken out.

  IMMIGRATION

  That was the house in which I was to live now, and around the house were the meadows, and around the meadows the woods with their uncut underbrush.

  There was the pond out of which dead trees stretched their arms like drowning people.

  A brook flowed steeply down into a wood in which raccoons climbed up the trees, snuffling porcupines scraped and slid through the bushes. There were sometimes lynxes that crouched with glowing eyes on the rocks and screamed shrilly.

  There wildcats spat, there wild rabbits ran, there skunks shuffled and stamped, there a bear sat in the bushes and ate raspberries. In the autumn cranes flew over the woods to the pond, in the summertime hummingbirds whirred in front of the windows, unfamiliar birdsongs came from trees, and in the sheds giant spiders with mighty bodies sat in their webs.

  At night the moon stood like a half-lowered sickle over the landscape with its strange animals.

  There were mountains wooded with firs, spruce, pine, beech, birch, elm, and maple trees. In the woods there were weasels, martens, and foxes. It was a landscape which resembled the one at home even in details, and yet it was totally unfamiliar and foreign.

  It was as if we had come into an enchanted, bewitched wood, in which every shape had been transformed, over which even the moon hung in a different corner.

  Even the sky no longer seemed to cover the earth like a bell jar; indeed, it was as if sky and earth had become parallel planes which met only in an infinity we could not see.

  This produced a feeling of expanse and boundlessness such as I had never known before.

  In optics a sentence about angles reads: “The size of the image on the retina depends on the angle of vision.”

  Now it appeared that the angle had been displaced and with it the images on the retina.

  We could no longer rely on what we had learned before—it was all completely new and completely different.

  Many immigrants have experienced and described this condition as a second childhood.

  We had to learn again how to see,
hear, feel, smell, taste. We had to accustom ourselves to the wide spaces, the division of space, and only very gradually did we find our equilibrium in the unaccustomed dimensions. It smelled different in the woods, in the meadows, in the house.

  Everything tasted different, since the earth was sweet and produced sweet plants and fruits. They mixed the sweet with the sour, and the taste was strange to us. We had to learn to talk and to know hundreds of phrases that were needed for daily life. We studied the spoken language, but we had trouble speaking it.

  It was all different and completely strange.

  In the late fall a loneliness settled around the house, one that came from the outside and thickened until we could almost see it. Later, with the first snow, a stillness fell, a pulsating stillness that swung back and forth and droned in our ears.

  It happened Saturday night. Sunday noon Finnish friends called us from the nearest university town.

  “What will happen?” said the wife in a troubled tone. “And what are you going to do?”

  “What we always do,” I answered, unsuspecting, “keep the house warm, cook, clean house, slowly get ready for winter.”

  “If they let you,” she said, and suddenly I noticed that she was speaking English, although we always spoke German with each other.

  “Has something happened?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you heard about Pearl Harbor yet?” she asked, astonished.

  “No,” I said, “we haven’t turned the radio on since the day before yesterday. What’s Pearl Harbor?”

  “The war,” she said.

  From that hour on we kept the radio tuned in, day and night, with only a few interruptions.

  It is a haunting instrument, the radio. There we sat now in our farmhouse, which lay like a Robinson Crusoe island in the woods, and suddenly we heard the noisy sound of human masses assembled in a great room. We heard the scuffing of shoes, the murmur of voices; we heard a group that was waiting for something cough and clear their throats; we heard and saw Washington waiting in our imaginations. Then for the length of one moment a deep, deathlike silence fell, and then he began to speak, “Mister President.”